Traditionally I hate RTS (real time strategy) as I like to ponder and choose and not feel like The game is a click-frenzy; however Northgard is so darn good I have to share. It is friendly to new players, has good gameplay which scales well, both single player campaign and multiplayer, and fantastic artwork. I grabbed it on a Steam sale and do not regret it. I’m still not confident that it’ll suit my game style and even in a basic game it feels chaotic. For now loving the game.
The Bard’s Tale 1,2,3 is apparently being remastered and released next week – perhaps to compete against WoW’s BfA expansion. What to play, what to play?
Who am I kidding, both have a relentless leveling grind so I’ll play wow to at least see some new models and zones. I don’t need Skara Brae that badly.
I’ve completed the Pathfinder achievement and gained flying in Legion. Crikey that was a long process – mainly due to the huge quest chains and the one required raid. I loved it regardless of the length of the quest chains as it felt a lot like a congruent story which was similar in style to what I would expect from a book or from pen and paper rpg. I mean that to be very high praise.
I’m also very excited and pleased that is over. I don’t have time for alts but I am considering doing daily quests on one of my other level 110 characters to get and spend Order Resources; for gold. Would be nice to start Battle for Azeroth with a nest egg. It also makes alt levelling far easier.
I was also finally able to finish the DK class quests which grant the flying undead dragon, and also have got Exalted rep with the Nightfallen. The DK class quests are amazing! I think Legion was worth the effort purely due to the integrated storyline and class quests I’ve seen – and I’ve only seen the DK quest line and a little of the Druid line.
A huge week. Happy killing.
I’m still playing WoW Legion after returning 3 months ago – specifically I’m trying to see the story (meaning world quests, dungeons, and raid content on scrub level), and get the Flying Achievement. For the first few 5-6 weeks I didn’t think I cared about flying as it seemed a task for later, but now it frustrates me watching other players swoop in, complete something, and swoop out. I’m now 5 weeks into playing scrub/casually and creeping up on the farmable reps, and the (huge) zone quests in Suramar.
Legion Flying takes dedicated attention to get because it requires completing all the zone quests, considerable effort in reputation farming, and making sure you have travelled everywhere. Those tasks unto themselves are worth it because they help/force the player to see the content. I dislike how unfriendly to roadways and cumbersome some of the zones are (High Mountain is a disgrace). So Legion Flying is essentially very easy when compared to very difficult content like the Mage-Tower fights, however it takes a concentrated effort of many months when you play very casually.
If I get Flying, see the raids, and a second Legendary drop by the time the expansion ends then I will be happy. … In the pic blow is Mortigen wearing a terrible clown-suit leveling drops surrounded by a few ghouls (unholy spec), a bodyguard, and a quest follower.
As reported by WoWHead – the finalists of the student art contest are fantastic. The selection has world of warcraft based in-game environments, new models, and animations.
Presented by Blizzard Entertainment’s University Relations and World of Warcraft development teams, the seventh annual Blizzard Student Art Contest has drawn to a close. After some fervent debate and impassioned deliberation, our judges sifted through the many remarkable entries and identified the winning entries.
Take a look. So, so great.
So what did I play this weekend? Well, two little little word games on my phone, a very short burst of Civ6 which I abandoned because the starting conditions were really poor after 20 turns, and World of Warcraft: Legion !
On WoW: Legion…
Happy killing folks, TyphoonAndrew
Its been a while since I considered WoW and thats not going to change soon – however I came across a wow’er’s blog which discussed the early levels and couldn’t resist this old bad joke. Happy travels folks.
The SA guys are at it again, and these are great – Video Game Movies You’d Want to See.
I bought Civ6 a day ago and started playing. Wow, the game has changed since my old days of Civ and Civ2. The endeavours and strategies look like they will be the same but so much of the game interface has changed – for the better. Here are my impressions.
I’m having so much fun discovering how to play a Civ game again. Just need to now get 60 hours in a day.
This comment reflects some of my frustration with Garrison Missions:
I have 25/25 level 100 followers as well. All are epic. All are ilevel 630 or higher. I’ve seen at most *3* ilevel 630 quests in the past WEEK at least. And I keep getting nothing but quests for more exp. I don’t mind it *TOO* much since I have a salvage yard, but it’s really annoying when it plateaus into uselessness…
In my case I have 20x active followers, and two inactive. 9x Epic, 11 Rare. All are ilevel 610 or higher, 15x or so are ilevel 630 or higher, 2x are 645. Yet my available higher level (615 & 630) missions are rewarding gear that is below what my character can use, and not rewarding upgrades for the followers either. Further the list of missions contains a large amount of xp missions and frankly almost everything on the rewards lists is almost pointless.
So I get gear I cannot use and nothing to help improve the situation. That’s frustrating. It appears that the inactive followers also influence what missions are offered. That’s silly.
Garrison Missions need to be changed, and changed in a way that allows players to prioritise or alter what missions they get. The WoW Forum thread above has some reasonable suggestions. Here are a few:
I had more fun in the early days of doing garrison missions than now. We had more diversity in missions, better combos, and far more tangible rewards. What felt like an interesting mini-game and offered rewards for the character now feels like a waiting game and a grind.
Something fun from the salvage yard is the class specific gear drops which emulate the starting character gear. For Death Knights the gear-set is easily obtainable, except that a new two handed rune-sword model was added in WoD. It is a really nice looking weapon, and I’ve luckily found one in a crate. The weapon goes by many names depending on what the source is (quests, crates, etc) – Heart Lesion Greatsword.
What might be coming in WoW v6.1? (blizzard official source, and wowhead’s views)
Bring it on, looking forward to it.
Molten Core is done! I feel like I can de-stress a little as I’ve gained the mount and the helm, and don’t plan to return to there at 100 anytime soon. It was great to do though. I plan to open up an Alt now so they can also have a Garrison, to both feed my main and have a different leveling experience through Warlords.
For MC I joined an in progress fight so only had to fight the last 4 bosses, and our group had a far harder time on the trash than the bosses. Strategy wise I think there were enough folk who knew what to kill in what order, that everyone else just followed along – so it was like very old school MC. I missed Sam yelling for decurse, and thought that Ragnaros in particular had been toned back in terms of difficulty to make the experience more LFR friendly. Nobody made the joke about looting the damn dogs, sadly.
My Death Knight Mortigen is finally level 100. He ding’ed in the Spire whilst handing in part of the Terrok story chain. Immediately I used the armor upgrades for level 100 I had earned from Follow Missions. Then I signed up for the Bronze challenge mode, and was extraordinarily lucky to get an epic weapon from the reward. Last night I also queued up for the “movie train instance” (Grim Rail Depot?) and fought through that instance with repeat wipes. It was worth it, due to the two 615 items which I won.
Aside – Grim Rail is a terrible instance for melee dps. Constantly avoiding ground effects, constantly moving, circling around opponents as they switch facing so often, and sprinting between foes. I’ve only been in there once, but I am almost certain that range have a better time. Blarrrg. Granted there may be better ways to do the fights than what I saw; I’ll see. I’m not looking forward to the heroic mode.
So I’ve only just ding’ed and I’m item level 604. Not bad for a dirty casual, but I need to keep the pressure on to get to 615 so that I can queue and repeat-wipe in Molten Core for the damn mount. The helm would be good, but I’m not going for that.
Well after a terrible login lag issue for almost all last night I was able to get online and get most of the way to level 98, then this morning level up to 98. Root cause was not communicated, and there was a 4 hour lag between any updates on the issue from any Customer Service team. Not playing a game between 8pm – 10pm is extremely frustrating, and Blizzard needs to up the service and improve their communications to players. I was not trying to raid, but most Oceanic raids would have been totally wiped out last night. Eventually the @BlizzardANZ twitter account had the update and after a reboot the server returned to almost normal. I still found some parts of the UI slow, especially when in a Garrison.
I’m in the Spire now and enjoying that zone. The quests are more haphazard and I think there is more flexibility in what order quests are unlocked. I prefer this. My Death Knight was 93 on 25 Nov, and I’m 98 10 days later, so allowing for Christmas feasts and parties I’ll be 100 in about another week to 10 days.
Hopefully that is enough to then get to average ilevel 615 for the Molten Core revamped raid and get the special mount and helm. I have an heirloom weapon which will be 620-ish when I’m 100, and then it means grinding through Dungeons and hoping I get lucky with Follower quests.
I’m enjoying the game, Warlords so far is great. It will be interesting to see what the long tail game-play is like for a non-raider (aka LFR Raider).
Happy logins to all, TyphoonAndrew
I’m about 5% away from level 93 now, and still loving Shadowmoon Valley. As a zone it is well put together. The rares spawn often, they drop interesting and sometimes useful things, the monsters are squishy enough (especially if you overgear the zone), and the travel time between hubs and quest locations is enough to get you “into” the zone and exploring without being tedious. There are the odd special things found along the way, like the quest to kill animals for steaks, or the special events for the garrison.
It is also a little morbid to look at this zone and think about what we know of the alternative from our character’s own timeline. I can see parallels in the geography and that helps make the story’s impact stronger. I wish I was able to level faster, but not at the cost of missing the experience.
Fair to say WoW is aborbing my thoughts and time again, so here are a few things which happened recently.
Happy hunting, farming, killing, looting, and roleplaying – TyphoonAndrew
WoW Nagrand oceanic. Position 3642 in queue, 126 mins. Dead? Right.
I’m kind of happy it’s like this: we have players everywhere.
Perhaps the Ddns attack affected times, perhaps it’s all the returning players. A bit of realm maint and the odd tweak we might see more capacity. I’ll wait. The content isn’t going anywhere.
Updates:
After a day of chatting about WoW to the nefarious gamer who first recruited me to World of Warcraft; I’ve resubscribed. It took a day to break my will, which means one of my favourite sayings by Oscar Wilde applies totally, “I can resist everything except temptation”.
Last night I ran Karazhan’s first boss five times to try to get the mount, UP once, and solved the archaeology Horn which makes your character bigger. It was great.
Related old news says WoW subs have increased again too as players return for Warlords (MMO Champ 14 Oct). We’ve seen this increase occur once before with the pre-Mists subscribers. It isn’t news in itself, but I think we will see a slightly different result from the Mists pre-sub drop off. My hunch (based upon only my gut feel) is that this time the subs will take significantly longer to drop away. They will drop away, but I’d not be surprised to see them climb upward again before doing so, and certainly expect the initial downward drop to take longer than it did in MoP.
Why? Part of my hunch is that the simplification from the item changed and the squish will remove a gearing attitude, and thus make it easier to maintain multiple sets, and therefore grant flexibility. There is also the appeal of WoD as something new, which is also a return to something that was popular back in the day. The Burning Crusade really built the WoW player-base, and many of us look fondly on Draenor.
Lastly I think they know how to make reasonable content, and many players and companies know that this formula works well. Yes, it is grindy, and a themepark, and often unbalanced, and also affected by a vocal minority … but everything is, especially in computer games. If Blizzard deliver quality the players will play. So far it looks promising.
TyphoonAndrew's - Eye of the Storm 